Patient Journey Mapping is a novel tool that leads to improved healthcare experiences.

Introduction

The healthcare industry is quickly recognizing the importance of improving experiences in healthcare. The thought in healthcare providers’ minds these days is the question of “how to make the patient experience better.”

Improving experiences can have wide-ranging benefits for healthcare businesses. These range from improving patient outcomes, earning higher reimbursements, increasing a business’ brand proposition to newer customers, reducing attrition, and improving employee morale among other benefits.

It can be easy to see then why healthcare businesses are choosing to focus on this aspect of healthcare at a time when the industry is rapidly growing and becoming increasingly competitive.

It is at this crucial juncture, the innovative use of processes like customer journey management and analysis to improve the patient experience. To differentiate it from the stages that a customer would experience during a purchase journey, these are instead named patient journeys for the healthcare industry.

Healthcare Experiences

Healthcare experiences, or patient experiences (PX), today are the most critical measure of success for the healthcare business. Tools like the HCAHPS Survey and the Patient Experience Platform survey by Press Ganey have now become ubiquitous in the industry. While these surveys measure patient satisfaction and not patient experiences, it is important to note that patient experiences drive patient satisfaction in the first place. It is what a patient experiences that determine how satisfied they are going to be with their care journeys.

But as seen by numerous surveys, patients are more likely to be unsatisfied with their healthcare journeys or at least less satisfied than what a healthcare provider imagines them to be.

The room for improvement is vast and undercapitalized at the moment.

It’s for this reason that healthcare organizations with 5-star HCAHPS ratings are standing out head and shoulders above their peers and competitors. The healthcare industry is rife with competition. With the average US adult spending an increasing amount of money on their healthcare needs in a year, healthcare businesses need to make their value proposition clear from the very beginning to attract new customers and retain older ones.

Higher patient experiences directly aid in this aspect. Good experiences lead to patients advocating and advertising a healthcare business to their friends and family for free. They also become loyal to healthcare practice and remain less likely to switch to a new provider.

In all the talks about bottom lines, and KPIs like ‘$ Revenue Per Patient’, an important factor is often forgotten in the equation. Or perhaps it is not given as much heed. Behind the money, reputation, and benefits, the key goal of any healthcare provider is to provide patients with treatment that leaves them satisfied and happy. This is a key vision and goal of many organizations in the industry.

Patient experience and satisfaction improvement is not a novel concept but improving it has proven harder and harder for the industry. Through enterprising solutions and adapting best practices of other industries, the healthcare business finally saw the introduction of Patient Journey Mapping.

Patient Journey Mapping

Patient Journey Mapping, or PJM if we prefer less of a mouthful, is a business process that visually represents the patient’s journey through the continuum of care. It visualizes all their interactions, conversations, questions, and more through the very start of the patient journey (which begins far earlier than what many think) and till the very end of it (which also ends far later than many realize).

Imagine for a moment a comprehensive document that details the entire process that a patient might undergo when they start their care journey. Starting from the moment that they research their symptoms online, to picking their care provider, to scheduling appointments, to the interactions they have in a healthcare setting, to finally ending their treatment. It would be a sizeable piece of document. This is why this data is being represented in a visual form to make it easier to parse.

Now the patient journey doesn’t necessarily detail the journey of every single “real” patient that will walk in through the doors of your business. It maps out journeys of what are known as ‘personas’. Each persona is slightly different from the other, having different desires, wants, needs, requirements and peeves. Through the mapping of various personas, a business is able to cover a large swathe of potential patients that will come through its doors. The use of personas is a development that has been carried over from the very well-studied field of customer journey management (CJM), essentially allowing you to walk in the shoes of your customers (or patients).

The patient journey is further divided into stages, stakeholders, and levels so that it can be easier to map out. But what does all this mapping lead to?

How PJM transforms PX

Your healthcare business has set up the personas they think they need, divided up the patient journey into stages, listed the stakeholders, and mapped out several patient journeys. You now have a (hopefully) very pretty-looking visual representation of all this data. But what do you do with it?

PJM allows healthcare businesses to look at the bigger picture in their healthcare settings. Looking at this data allows them to see where patients are experiencing the most discomfort, where their needs are being unmet, and where providers can take a few extra steps to satisfy customers. A high-level view of the entire process leads to cohesiveness throughout the entire healthcare organization.

Through patient journey mapping healthcare businesses:

• Breakdown care silos and create integrated healthcare systems

• Guide their patients with the correct information and experiences

• Understand the frustrations of patients and work on removing them

• Prevent communication breakdowns between patients and providers

• Constantly improve the patient experience

Conclusion

Patient experience improvement today is emerging as the key focus for healthcare businesses to continue to compete, grow and thrive in an increasingly competitive ever-changing environment.

BraveLabs provides healthcare businesses with proprietary frameworks to help improve patient experiences with patient journey mapping.